Wow, it's been 4 years since I last did a blog post. I guess then I got all excited by the 'cloud' thing then it wore off as that all became pretty standard. Though I still see a lot copy about cloud still as Oracle etc grapple to catch up in that respect, sad times.
Anyway, after spending a lot of time grappling with the world of consumer IoT for Hive (British Gas 'Connected Homes' business) in the last 3 years I thought, actually, there is something interesting to talk about again.
I am not afraid to say it, but over the last 3 years helping grow an IoT business within British Gas, I have probably been more out of my comfort zone than in the previous 10. On occasion I have felt similar to Roberto Soldado below (yellow one) when he was completely done by Firmino in that recent Europa League match.
Part of this is because IoT is a pretty new field when it comes to the consumer mass market - when thinking about some of the business and tech challenges, in a lot of areas there have been limited reference points. Part of it is due to being part of a 'startup' for the first time - Hive was kicked off as a 'lean startup' within British Gas (agile etc - the intention of Bimodal mode 2). On the first point, there will be subsequent blog posts drilling into the business and related tech challenges. On the startup point, I want to elaborate here.
On the majority of CRM-related projects I had been involved with before prior, a company had an old CRM system/process which they wanted to replace with something more modern. Some vision to move the established business from old world to new world. So there was a decent amount of context. In a startup, there is no 'existing' business to start with, no existing systems, so the world is your oyster. Blank canvas. In 2013, we ventured into the world of consumer IoT and not many others had gone there at that time. It's still early days now.
What I found at the start was that it was great being part of such a intentionally hand-crafted small 'Connected Homes' team. Co-located with startup veterans - entrepreneurial types who had exited their own startups, commercial and marketing teams, operations and the tech teams. As standard in this kind of 'digital' startup you have various tech teams which CRM needs to work very closely with nowadays. The 'CRM' system isn't managing all customer interactions these days, not like it used to, we all know that. It's a close cross-team effort with the web (site/shop etc) team, mobile apps team and in the case of IoT, the team that owns that IoT platform (more about that in a subsequent post).
All of these platforms touch the customer in different ways. Then you have the proliferation of tools around the edge - social marketing tools, ESPs etc - it can be complex to align to ensure a good end to end customer experience. The responsibility for the 'CRM platform' (in this case Salesforce) needs to be agreed - ie you don't want to be actually storing all device interactions in Salesforce, for instance, or surfacing high volume web pages from Salesforce etc etc. Equally you don't want the web team building a bunch of custom support tools which replicate Service Cloud. Salesforce has it's place and I think from the word go we have done a good job of blending that platform well with the other tech that exists at Hive. Architecture basically (oooh, don't say that out loud in a 'lean' environment). More on that in another post.
An interesting observation from starting to work with these teams back in 2013, and people with a startup mentality is that to some extent, you feel very 'enterprise' being the owner of 'CRM'. Or maybe a bit of a dinosaur. You know, Salesforce is great, and UI-wise may be getting there with lightening etc, but you show it to someone and compared to the funky stuff they are doing with web/mobile UX or the funky IoT tech, they will quickly switch off! Also these guys are all in 'open-source' land (a land sometimes needing a decent amount of containment, another post for that) so anything 'proprietary' is best case seen as 'boring', worst case 'evil'.
So, the challenge awaits, it's Feb 2013, and we need to go live as a new business in September 2013. We need a system to run this new and undefined business, to enter a new and undefined IoT market. And I need to work out my purpose in life in relation to the other teams. Salesforce and I are NOT dinosaurs, no we are not...that's the intro, more to come in the next post.
Anyway, after spending a lot of time grappling with the world of consumer IoT for Hive (British Gas 'Connected Homes' business) in the last 3 years I thought, actually, there is something interesting to talk about again.
I am not afraid to say it, but over the last 3 years helping grow an IoT business within British Gas, I have probably been more out of my comfort zone than in the previous 10. On occasion I have felt similar to Roberto Soldado below (yellow one) when he was completely done by Firmino in that recent Europa League match.
Part of this is because IoT is a pretty new field when it comes to the consumer mass market - when thinking about some of the business and tech challenges, in a lot of areas there have been limited reference points. Part of it is due to being part of a 'startup' for the first time - Hive was kicked off as a 'lean startup' within British Gas (agile etc - the intention of Bimodal mode 2). On the first point, there will be subsequent blog posts drilling into the business and related tech challenges. On the startup point, I want to elaborate here.
On the majority of CRM-related projects I had been involved with before prior, a company had an old CRM system/process which they wanted to replace with something more modern. Some vision to move the established business from old world to new world. So there was a decent amount of context. In a startup, there is no 'existing' business to start with, no existing systems, so the world is your oyster. Blank canvas. In 2013, we ventured into the world of consumer IoT and not many others had gone there at that time. It's still early days now.
What I found at the start was that it was great being part of such a intentionally hand-crafted small 'Connected Homes' team. Co-located with startup veterans - entrepreneurial types who had exited their own startups, commercial and marketing teams, operations and the tech teams. As standard in this kind of 'digital' startup you have various tech teams which CRM needs to work very closely with nowadays. The 'CRM' system isn't managing all customer interactions these days, not like it used to, we all know that. It's a close cross-team effort with the web (site/shop etc) team, mobile apps team and in the case of IoT, the team that owns that IoT platform (more about that in a subsequent post).
All of these platforms touch the customer in different ways. Then you have the proliferation of tools around the edge - social marketing tools, ESPs etc - it can be complex to align to ensure a good end to end customer experience. The responsibility for the 'CRM platform' (in this case Salesforce) needs to be agreed - ie you don't want to be actually storing all device interactions in Salesforce, for instance, or surfacing high volume web pages from Salesforce etc etc. Equally you don't want the web team building a bunch of custom support tools which replicate Service Cloud. Salesforce has it's place and I think from the word go we have done a good job of blending that platform well with the other tech that exists at Hive. Architecture basically (oooh, don't say that out loud in a 'lean' environment). More on that in another post.
An interesting observation from starting to work with these teams back in 2013, and people with a startup mentality is that to some extent, you feel very 'enterprise' being the owner of 'CRM'. Or maybe a bit of a dinosaur. You know, Salesforce is great, and UI-wise may be getting there with lightening etc, but you show it to someone and compared to the funky stuff they are doing with web/mobile UX or the funky IoT tech, they will quickly switch off! Also these guys are all in 'open-source' land (a land sometimes needing a decent amount of containment, another post for that) so anything 'proprietary' is best case seen as 'boring', worst case 'evil'.
So, the challenge awaits, it's Feb 2013, and we need to go live as a new business in September 2013. We need a system to run this new and undefined business, to enter a new and undefined IoT market. And I need to work out my purpose in life in relation to the other teams. Salesforce and I are NOT dinosaurs, no we are not...that's the intro, more to come in the next post.
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